1. Field of the Invention
The present invention concerns an optoelectronic power device, the active part of which is formed by an integrated circuit combining a plurality of laser semiconductors. By analogy with integrated circuits called "sea of gates" integrated circuits, the integrated circuit according to the invention could be called a "sea of lasers" circuit. The invention also concerns a method for fabricating this integrated circuit of lasers.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Semiconductor lasers in the form of discrete elements or in arrays associating several elementary lasers are well known, but they give only little energy as compared with gas lasers or excimers for example. They are suitable for the reading of information in optical memories, or in association with optical fibers in telecommunications, but are no longer sufficient for applications requiring high power, such as industrial cutting or soldering, or medical applications.
For applications such as this, either gas lasers or solid lasers are used.
Solid lasers, as opposed to semiconductors lasers which are also in the solid state, are round sectioned or square sectioned rods, about 5 cm by 5 cm, made of materials such as YAGs (yttrium-aluminium-garnet), YLFs (yttrium-lithium-fluoride) or lithium niobate Li Nb O.sub.3, all doped with neodymium for example. These rods emit a coherent light in the windows centered on 1.06, 1.55 or 2.1 .mu.m, respectively, when they are excited by a xenon flash lamp, supplied at 1.5 kV and several tens of amperes, with a yield of 0.01%.
Not only is this yield very poor but also the xenon lamps, which are very costly, last only about 100 hours, and their supply is also very costly and bulky.
It would therefore be worthwhile to replace the flash lamp which excites a solid laser by a power semiconductor device that emits a coherent light.